enshittification

~bartender, a coffee, please? actually, just leave the whole pot.

sooooo

tumblr announced it's officially selling users' data to ai companies, which sucks massively. tumblr is the only social media i use that i actually participate in versus lurking, and i've been on that site since 2011. it sucks seeing it go downhill so fast, but i'm afraid a lot of sites like those are going to give in to greed. i hate that we're just. things to be marketed to. collections of data to be sold to increase marketing to increase profits. i'm getting so tired of my favorite websites getting worse and worse. i know the old adage is 'if it's free, you're the product' but i soooo wish that wasn't true.

i recently learned about gemini from a post by ~the8thworld (ty!) and i've done some rudimentary digging into it. i would like to escape from the broader internet but a lot of it is a little out of my grasp yet. i have (what i hope is) above-average computer literacy compared to the rest of the population -- enough to have installed pihole and run cmd, at least -- but while watching a video about it on yt, i realized i still have a long way to go before i can safely start to mess with these things. the first step is probably to learn to use linux :p

anyway, there's only so many hours in a day. the smolnet will have to be a goal for future-me. in the meantime, at least this pub exists <3

257m

Its been a while since I have participated on corporate social media. I occasionally touch Mastodon and Lemmy on the fediverse, view some server local netnews and usually hang around IRC and that's pretty much the extent of my social media access. I am glad I am past the days of regularly perusing reddit. I definitely think decentralized platforms are the future and it is not worth participating on centralized proprietary corporate platforms no matter how strong the network effect.

It is saddening to see tumblr decay but hopefully the community there finds a brighter future on a different platform.

gmund

What makes you think that the smolnet will not be used for AI training? After all, the whole content is text-based, which makes it easier to use for AI training.

The smolnet operators will not even get paid for it. The big operators can put API limits and other road-blocks to prevent AI and other companies to drain their content. The smolnet has no means to prevent. Especially with Gemini you can't even block the content hogs by putting up captcha's. (No cookies, only rudimentary picture support, only rudimentary data entry)

beefox

while this is true, and web crawlers are the ones doing the scraping, it feels different to have your work stolen by a third party then it does stolen by the site you put it on, especially when its a multi million buisness

mechanicalmagpie

I was so mad when I found out about Tumblr. I've been on there since around 2012 and my Internet grammar and humor was strongly shaped by it. but now it's going the way of all the other social media companies, y'know. the ones I left for Tumblr, to get away from all that.

anyway, all that to say, I'm right there with you. <3